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In Egypt, Democrats vs. Liberals

WASHINGTON — MILLIONS of Egyptians have spoken: President Mohamed Morsi, elected a year ago, has failed. With vast throngs calling for his ouster and demanding new elections, the army has given him an ultimatum: satisfy the crowds by Wednesday evening or face military intervention. How could this happen, two years after the military helped demonstrators rid Egypt of the autocrat Hosni Mubarak?

Egypt has a dilemma: its politics are dominated by democrats who are not liberals and liberals who are not democrats.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi’s Islamist movement, accepts — indeed excels at — electoral competition. Voters in 2012 gave it a far stronger grip on power than poll numbers had suggested. But that was foreseeable: though outlawed, the group built an effective political machine, starting in the 1980s, as individual members ran (as independents) in legislative and professional labor-union elections, even though Mr. Mubarak always found artifices to deny them real power.

Fair elections have improved the Brotherhood’s campaign skills. But it hasn’t fully committed to pluralism or to equal rights for minorities. It participates in democracy, but doesn’t want to share power.

Many in the opposition, on the other hand, believe fiercely in minority rights, personal freedoms, civil liberties and electoral coalition-building — as long as the elections keep Islamists out of power. In other words, they are liberal without being democrats; they are clamoring fervently for Mr. Morsi’s ouster and want the military to intervene. But they have proved themselves woefully unequipped to organize voters. Though my heart is with their democratic goals, I must admit that their commitment to democratic principles runs skin deep.

So today, Egypt faces a disturbing paradox: an ostensibly democratic movement is calling on the military, which produced six decades of autocrats, to oust a democratically elected president — all in the name of setting the country, once again, on a path to democracy.

Since Mr. Mubarak was ousted, I have visited Egypt a half-dozen times to study the course of democracy there, most recently in March. I can attest that a year ago, most Egyptians were eager to see the generals leave the scene. Indeed, Mr. Morsi’s most popular act remains his firing of the defense minister and the military’s chief of staff last August. Strikingly, the general whom Mr. Morsi installed as defense minister, Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, now seems to hold the fate of Mr. Morsi in his hands.

Mr. Mubarak ruled through fraudulent elections, with the support of Egypt’s security forces, crony capitalists and the United States and other powers. Mr. Morsi is something else entirely: Egypt’s democratically elected president.

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Still, he has been a disastrous leader: divisive, incompetent, heavy-handed and deaf to wide segments of Egyptian society who do not share his Islamist vision. He and his Brotherhood backers have focused on consolidating power rather than delivering on his promises — to represent all Egyptians; to fix the economy; to make the streets safer, cleaner, less traffic-choked; to treat all Egyptians equally. None have been kept.

Those are arguments against him. But using nondemocratic means to remove an elected leader, however inept, subverts the very essence of democracy by departing from its first principle: the dependable transfer of power peacefully through elections.

Even some of Mr. Morsi’s detractors rightly point out that the president’s removal through mass protests and military intervention would set a terrible precedent. Egyptians would be encouraged to take to the streets and ask the generals to intervene whenever a president became unpopular. The genius of democracy, by contrast, is that it wants voters to change their minds when leaders fail and to replace them not in spasms of fury but regularly and for the best reason: that others can better deliver what the people want.

To arrive at such a system, though, the people need patience and faith that leaders can be voted out. Mr. Morsi hurt himself badly with his efforts last November to sidestep the courts while he rammed through a constitution.

Still, integrating Islamists is essential if Egypt is to have stable, democratic politics. Movements like the Brotherhood are a core constituency in Egyptian society; democracy requires their inclusion. If the millions in the streets want the Brotherhood out of power, they must learn to organize and campaign effectively, and vote them out.

That would be the best way to establish liberal democracy in Egypt. Removing Mr. Morsi through a military coup supported by the secular and liberal opposition could well be the worst.

Samer S. Shehata is an associate professor of international studies at the University of Oklahoma.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 3, 2013, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: In Egypt, Democrats Vs. Liberals. Today's Paper|Subscribe